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At the recent South East Regional Grade 3 - 5 Competition (March 2008), the club had several competitors jumping for the first time. Of course they knew what they were doing and they all did very well, but nobody ever explains to the parents what is going on! The poor adults were left completely bewildered by the whole process. I promised to rectify that oversight with a very short, very simple beginner's guide to competition scoring. I have tried this before and ended up with a huge document, where I tried to explain everything, but eventually gave up the unequal struggle, because there is just so much that might happen and I was trying to give as much information as possible to cover every eventuality.
This time I'm going to keep it simple. Very simple. I'm going to restrict it to Grade 3 - 5 competitions and I'm not going to even attempt to explain any of the terminology. I may resurrect the detailed document at some point, which does contain everything you're ever likely to want to know, but in the meantime I'm going to assume you know practically nothing about the sport, but I'm not going to bore you with detail you really don't care about.
So. Here goes.
You're really only interested in the group your competitor is jumping in, so let's just say you're aware that several groups will be jumping on the same trampoline, but they are all separate groups so we don't really care about the others. So. You've got a group of, say 30. At every grade and age group there is a set routine, of 10 moves, which everyone in that group has to perform. The order of jumping is determined by a computer program and is random. Everyone performs their routine in front of 5 judges, who mark it. The judges are initially given 10 points, one for each individual move. They deduct between 0.0 and 0.5 from each move, depending on how well it was performed. At the end of the routine they will end up with a score, which they hold up and which is registered. Generally speaking anything between about 6.8 and 7.2 is OK, between 7.3 and 7.6 is pretty good, 7.7 to 8.0 is very good and above 8.0 excellent.
Once everyone in the group has done their "set" routine, they then perform a "voluntary" routine, which is another 10 jumps but can include different moves. This is usually determined by the competitor and coach together. It can be the same as the "set" but doesn't have to be. Quite often this will be a slightly harder routine as it is designed to show off the preformer's ability. At this point, together with the original 5 judges a further judge adds a tariff, which is an additional mark to include the difficulty of the moves in the routine - for instance a somersault is more difficult to perform than a full twist so it attracts a higher tariff mark. This often confuses people watching, because they see scores of 7.4, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.2 and 1.5 and wonder why that judge on the end gave such a different score to the others! Well that was the tariff judge and it's OK, they haven't gone mad.
And that's it, really. Once all the scores from both routines have been added up, the highest score wins. Usually the jumping order is changed from the "set" to the "voluntary" so that the competitor with the highest score in the "set" goes last in the "Voluntary", but other than that there's not much else to say...... without going into detail about tariff and what the judges are looking for and so on. .... and I promised I wouldn't do that. This is supposed to be a beginner's guide so I'll leave it there for now.
I hope this has helped. If you need any more detail, ask one of the Coaches or one of our Judges and they will be able to confuse you utterly in a very short space of time!
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